Oracle Faces Class-Action Lawsuit for Collecting, Profiling, and Selling the Data of 5B Users
Oracle has admitted to collecting, profiling and selling the data of billions of people despite stating it “does not have a direct relationship” with these people.
Enterprise software company Oracle faces a class-action lawsuit concerning its data collection practices. Filed on behalf of “worldwide Internet users who have been subject to Oracle’s privacy violations,” the lawsuit alleges Oracle collected data, prepared dossiers of more than half of the global population, and sold them to third parties without taking prior consent from data subjects.
The lawsuit focuses on Oracle ID Graph, a service designed to synchronize and combine disparate data across multiple channels, and Oracle Data Marketplace, one of the world’s largest data exchange platforms.
Dr. Johnny Ryan, a senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, Dr. Jennifer Golbeck, an associate computer science professor at the University of Maryland, and Michael Katz-Lacabe, the director of research at the Center for Human Rights and Privacy, referred to a 2016 presentation made by Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison wherein he said there were five billion people in Oracle ID Graph.
Ellison made the presentation almost a year after the launch of ID Graph. “How many people are on Earth? Seven billion,” Ellison said at the time. “Two billion to go.”
Bart Willemsen, analyst and VP at Gartner, expressed that Ellison had no business boasting of Oracle, a primarily enterprise-focused company, having so much user data. He wrote, “To present a slide like this, advertising you have *5 billion consumer profiles* and are proud of it, while being Oracle, a company hardly any regular digital consumer even thinks they’re actively interacting with or connected to…is BEGGING for attention.”
The litigants allege “deliberate and purposeful surveillance of the general population” on the part of Oracle, which tracks users in real-time and indefinitely records collected data without consent. The company also profiles users using ID Graph and sells them to third parties through either ID Graph or any other platform.
Oracle’s revenue for the fiscal year ending Q2 2022 stands at $42.4 billion. The lawsuit is the latest case against rampant surveillance capitalism made possible through many online services used by “unwitting internet users.”
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Using cookies, tracking pixels, device identification, cross-device tracking and other tools, the data that Oracle collects includes:
- Personal information: users’ names, home and work addresses, e-mail addresses, and telephone numbers.
- Behavioral data: websites visited by users, online and offline purchases, where they shop, and their mode of payment.
- Income, political views, hobbies, etc.
“Oracle makes no pretense of having directly obtained consent from the persons whose data it gathers. At no point during its process of collecting or processing personal data, or the compiling of dossiers or selling services based on that personal data, does Oracle ever directly ask individuals for their consent,” the plaintiffs stated in their complaint.
“Oracle legally acknowledges this by virtue of its registration as a data broker wherein it admits it “does not have a direct relationship” with the subjects whose data it exploits.
The three plaintiffs alleged that Oracle violated California and federal data privacy laws. These include the California Common Law, the Federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Unfair Competition Law, the California Invasion of Privacy Act, the Federal Wiretap Act, and more. This is primarily because the U.S. lacks a federal privacy law, unlike Europe’s GDPR.
“Oracle has violated the privacy of billions of people across the globe. This is a Fortune 500 company on a dangerous mission to track where every person in the world goes, and what they do,” stated ICCL’s Ryan, who has previously worked as the chief policy & industry relations officer for the privacy-focused Brave browser.
“We are taking this action to stop Oracle’s surveillance machine.”
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